Regional Cannibal Sandwich

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Antoinette, and I’m in Appleton, Wisconsin.

Hello, Antoinette.

Hi, I have a question for you.

All right.

Okay.

And I would like to know if a cannibal sandwich is something that is peculiar to Wisconsin and specifically to Milwaukee.

I thought you were just going to end with, is peculiar.

It sure sounds that way to me.

Okay, tell us what a cannibal sandwich is.

A cannibal sandwich starts out with a heaping pile of raw ground round steak.

And you take a piece of rye bread, and you slather some butter on it,

And then you put a nice big chunk of this raw meat,

And you sprinkle liberally with salt and pepper, and then you top it with raw onion.

Antoinette, you should see Martha’s face.

She’s quite disgusted.

Well, I was describing this to my boss, who’s a vegetarian, and his eyes started rolling back into his head.

From pleasure or fear?

It looked like he was going to pass out.

Me too. Where are the smelling salts?

That must be an incredibly strong dish.

Is it associated with a particular holiday or time of day?

Is this a last meal? Because it sounds like it.

Well, my experience with it, I’m originally from Milwaukee,

And when we went over to my uncle’s house for holidays, we’d have this big honking plate of raw meat,

And we’d make these sandwiches, and it was just so delicious.

And this was back in the day when people obviously didn’t know or didn’t care

That maybe raw beef wasn’t the best thing for your health.

Yeah.

It’s so great because you get the chewy bread, and then the beef kind of melts into the butter,

And then you got the crunch of the raw onion on the top, and it’s just wonderful.

Nice.

I’m a carnivore myself.

I’d like to try that.

Cannibal sandwich.

Do you still eat these, Antoinette?

I have not for quite a while.

And you can get steak tartare in a restaurant, but that’s a little too dear and delicate.

This is a real sandwich sandwich.

I see.

This is a man’s dish.

Yes.

Or a woman’s dish.

Brute’s dish.

Yes.

Put hair on your chest no matter what your sex.

Right.

Exactly.

Well, I got to say, you’re questioned in there somewhere in this delicious sounding food.

Speak for yourself.

You wanted to know if this was pertinent to your part of the country.

Yeah.

Okay.

A colleague of ours by the name of Barry Popik specializes in digging up food words.

And he has done some work on cannibal sandwich.

You can find his website at BarryPopik.com.

P-O-P-I-K.

Barry Popik.

And he has found that it goes back to the 1880s and that he believes that it’s somehow in the 1890s.

It was particularly popular in Philadelphia and Detroit.

And he finds many uses of it throughout the years.

And you can do your own search on Google News Archive and Google Books and just the raw Internet and find with onion and rye bread.

And you’ll find that this is still appears occasionally in cookbooks.

But they’re not the kind of cookbooks that you’re going to make wedding food from.

They’re not the kind of cookbooks where you’re planning the dessert to serve the new in-laws.

Oh, my gosh, no.

Well, Grant, what about the distribution?

I’ve seen references to it in Texas.

Yeah, all over the place.

I don’t think that there’s a strong regional component.

Certainly in the 1880s and 1890s, the western part of the United States wasn’t overly developed.

I mean, it wasn’t like there were massive cities out here at the time.

I mean, there wasn’t a great deal happening.

I mean, plenty of towns out here.

It’s just they’re a lot smaller than they are now.

So it’s hard to really pin it down and say that it, I don’t know.

The diachronic information is not clear.

Because I was mentioning this to somebody who is from eastern Pennsylvania,

And he had never heard of it.

Yeah, this looks like it’s a kind of dish that’s passed from father to son.

I don’t know.

Or from…

Well, if you were a little boy, wouldn’t you think you were so cool eating?

A cannibal sandwich?

Here’s one recipe from a

Fort Worth, Texas newspaper from

1907. Put a half a pound of

Raw beef through a meat chopper.

Add a teaspoon full of salt, a dash

Of red pepper, and a tablespoon

Of onion juice. Spread this over

Buttered rye bread. Cover with another piece

Of bread and trim away the crust.

I love that. You’re putting

Raw meat on rye bread and you’re going to take the

Crust off. They’re going to cut it diagonally

Too, right? And serve it on a saucer

With a little porcelain teacup.

Oh, wow.

That sounds great.

Antoinette, I bet you’re bringing back lots of memories for lots of people.

I hope I am.

I hope I am.

Probably making other ones like me cringe.

I’m going to go to menu pages and see if I can find this in San Diego.

Okay.

Antoinette, thanks for calling and sharing.

Doesn’t look like there’s a regional component to it.

It’s not particular to any part of the country, but, boy, that’s a great word.

Cannibal sandwich.

There’s not really a cannibal in there, right?

Gosh, I hope not.

I hope not.

Serve it with graveyard stew, right?

Thanks so much.

Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, Grant, don’t we love those food words?

Oh, boy, do we.

From people’s memory banks.

Wow.

Cannibal sandwich.

Jinx, you owe me coke.

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